Sunday, May 16, 2021

Amazon Photos

Sorry, but this is just a rant. I'm an Amazon Prime user. I have several Amazon Echos. On the Echos, I have the display set to play a slideshow of photos from Amazon Photos.

That has been working fine until 05/11/21. The Echo Show 5 started only displaying the weather, no photos. I poked around in the settings and confirmed that I had the display set to show my photos, the weather, and upcoming calendar events.

Amazon has a tacky habit of silently turning on other features but this time that hadn't happened. So I navigated to re-select the Amazon Photos album to use as a slideshow.

I got a screen that prompted me to sign up for Amazon Photos. But, I already had that capability with Amazon Prime.

I went to my Echo Show 8 HD. It was showing the slideshow. Just for fun, I navigated to re-select the Amazon Photos album to use as a slideshow.

BINGO, I got a screen that prompted me to sign up for Amazon Photos in spite of the slideshow working just fine.

Ok, so I went an logged into the web interface of Amazon Photos. Every time I tried to access an album I got a message that there had been an error and I should try again later.

By then, I was really confused. My next 2 routes were to 1) factory reset my Echo Show 5 or 2) call Amazon for support. Neither seemed particularly likely to resolve the problem.

So I ignored it for a couple of days.

Then on 05/13/21 I got an e-mail from Amazon saying:


Putting that ANYWHERE earlier would have been very valuable to me.

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